Introduction

We commonly attribute actions to social collectives and especially to proper social groups. Social collectives can be practically any kind of groups, organized or not and their members need not be psycho­logically connected.

Thus, we use locutions like “Apple produces smartphones,” “Russia attacked Ukraine,” “the board dismissed Smith,” “the soccer team scored,” and so on. Not only do we attribute actions to groups but we ascribe responsibility to social groups for (their) actions as well. Locutions like the following are quite common. “The Exxon Corporation was responsible for the worst oil spill in American history when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska,” or “Germany was responsible for the Second World War,” or “The club as a whole is to blame for being relegated.” On the basis of examples like these it seems reasonable to accept this common-sense view at least in part and to think that true statements of the above kind can be made.

We will do so here and investigate some central philosophical and conceptual problems related to actions performed by groups and responsibility for such actions. Our main interest is in the (retrospective) moral responsibility for actions performed by groups. Roughly, when we hold a group retrospectively morally responsible for some action we take the members of the group, qua members of the group, to be praiseworthy or blameworthy for what the group has done in light of some normative standard. Thus, in our view, the “truthmaker” of a collective attribution of moral responsibility is the moral responsibility borne by the individual members, qua members, of the group. Moral standard is of course the paradigm but an action can also be appraised from other evaluative perspectives, e.g.

It is fair to hold an individual agent responsible for some action only if the agent has certain capacities (e.g. rationality, capability of intentional action) and the agent freely exercised these capacities in acting. Thus, there are both internal and external factors to be taken into account here when deciding whether the action was “up to the agent” in the right way.

In this chapter we will look for precise criteria for group action and, especially, for the group’s moral responsibility for such action. We will focus on the following questions: a) When is an action attributable to a group as its action? b) Under what conditions do the actions by the members of the group generate action attributable to the group? c) What does it mean that a group bears responsibility for its action? d) Under what conditions is it justified to hold the group responsible for the actions performed by the members of the group? Questions a) and b) will be answered in terms of the account given in Tuomela (2013), chapter 3, and our discussion will mainly summarize that account. As to c) and d), we will have new things to say, and in part our answer to a) and b) will be used to generate answers to the latter two questions.

We claim that the strongest case for group responsibility is the responsibility in the following case concerned with a voluntary group. The responsibility concerns an internally and exter­nally free group action, or the outcome of such action, as evaluated on the basis of a “relevant” normative standard (viz. evaluative perspective) that the group was aware of and accepted as its standard or at least in some sense ought to have accepted as its standard.

In our view group responsibility for an action performed by the group can be accounted for in terms of responsibility ascribed jointly to (individual) members of the group acting qua members of the group, that is, the group members are together and interdependently respon­sible for the action. Group responsibility understood along these lines is a central notion of collective responsibility if not the notion of collective responsibility.

“Internally free” group action depends on such action performed by the members of the group g that none of the members of g was forced or coerced by other members of the group to agree with the group decision, or to act in accordance with it. A group action was “exter­nally free” if there was no external pressure on the members of the group to adopt the goal, to make the plan and to perform the action. By external pressure we mean pressure exerted on the group by other groups or agents outside the group. If the action performed by the group was both internally and externally free we can say, in somewhat metaphorical terms, that the group acted out of its own free “group-will.”

In our account the central criteria for a legitimate ascription of group responsibility to a member qua a member of the group are collective commitment and collective acceptance of the action (acceptance, belief, intention or what have you) in question.

Social groups will here be assumed to be collectives capable of action possessing an authoritative decision-making mechanism (see Tuomela 2013: chapter 3). Group member­ship here need not involve more than that an agent regards himself as a member of the group and that the other members of the group tend to regard him as a member of the group. Thus, legitimate ascription of group responsibility is not based on or justified by mere formal membership.

In our view group responsibility, qua joint responsibility as explained above, is, or can be, legitimately ascribed to both operative and non-operative members of the group. Operative members are the actively acting members in virtue of whose action the group’s action comes about (cf. Tuomela 2013: chapter 3). Here we take it for granted that the notion of group responsibility admits degrees pretty much the same way as the notion of moral responsibility does. A non-operative member who learned only afterwards of the action performed by his group and accepted it retrospectively may bear less joint responsibility than an agent who acted as an operative member. The strength of the group responsibility borne by non-operative members depends on their awareness of what the group is doing, their possibility to control or influence the group’s action, and so on.

Our primary focus will be on voluntary and internally authorized groups. By voluntary groups we mean groups the membership of which is up to the members, that is, in the paradigm case both entry and exit are voluntary. We presuppose that the agents have had a choice whether to become a member of the group in question or not, as opposed to nations for instance where citizenship typically is not a result of the agent’s choice. Non-voluntary groups are obviously more problematic from the point of view of the collective responsibility of the non-operative members. Internally authorized groups as opposed to externally authorized groups are groups in which operative agents, either operative members or representatives, get their authority to act on behalf of the group from the members of the group in question. (For more on authorization see Tuomela 2013: ch 3.)

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